The San Francisco Symphony is currently facing challenging times.
With the search for a new Music Director set to begin soon, as Esa-Pekka Salonen prepares to leave the orchestra in June, proposed budget cuts are already affecting the 2024-25 season. Notably, performances of Verdi’s Requiem—which would have marked Salonen’s first orchestral series concerts—have been canceled due to a strike by the Symphony Chorus.
As a result, the Baroque-themed concerts held on Friday and Saturday, September 27-28, became the unofficial opening weekend program of Salonen’s final season, following the Symphony’s gala concert on Wednesday, September 25. Encouragingly, the orchestra’s performance on Saturday, which was observed by the Chronicle, infused Davies Symphony Hall with a palpable sense of hope, suggesting to both musicians and listeners that the past could serve as a refuge, if only for a few nights.
Before rising to prominence as one of today’s leading classical composers, Nico Muhly was a choirboy immersed in Renaissance ecclesiastical music in Rhode Island. His new Piano Concerto, inspired by the works of 18th-century French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, was written for the Symphony and French pianist Alexandre Tharaud, who premiered the piece this weekend.
Muhly’s score features antique elements—gestures and embellishments that culminate in a hypnotic passacaglia (a Baroque lament) at the center of the work. Gradually, the repeating chords in the piano merge into an orchestral blend; some chords are vivid while others fade into a dull brown. The outer sections of the concerto find their groove across centuries, resonating with both Muhly and Tharaud, who initially connected online as fans of Baroque music.
Interestingly, “Throughline,” a small-ensemble piece by Muhly that premiered virtually in November 2020, was one of the few noteworthy pandemic-era projects deserving a second listen. The 43-year-old composer, based in New York City, wrote it while serving as one of eight collaborators recruited by Salonen to create and curate new music for the ensemble, aiming to innovate the program.
Although those partnerships, established at Salonen’s appointment in 2018, formally concluded last June, this weekend’s program offered its own unique touch. The orchestra revived two lesser-known reworkings of music by J.S. Bach: Edward Elgar’s grand transcription of the Fantasia and Fugue in C Minor and Paul Hindemith’s playful “Ragtime (Well-Tempered).” Both pieces were well executed, though they were relatively brief.
The highlight of the evening was the inclusion of a more substantial Hindemith work: the Mathis Der Maler (Mathis the Painter) Symphony.
Derived from Hindemith’s seldom-performed opera, the music evokes scenes from Christian iconography, and in this symphonic arrangement, the drama unfolds on a grand scale. The death of Christ is conveyed through whispering strings, which were complemented by the lush playing of the woodwind section, led by principal flute Yubeen Kim and principal oboe Eugene Izotov. In another poignant moment, angels—voiced by the low brass—offered melodies that, in this performance, concluded too soon.
As the narrative deepens, ominous forces confront the hero. By the opera’s conclusion, Mathis, based on the real-life 16th-century painter Matthias Grünewald, departs this world, paralleling Hindemith’s own departure from Germany, where his works were condemned by the Nazis. Yet the music, like the artist, endures.
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